The Ridge(73)
“I could,” he said. “Now, it looks to me like these are microfilm printouts. But they aren’t from my paper.” Even now, he couldn’t get that out of his system. My paper. “I was thinking that there was a predecessor to the Sentinel. Very old. Back when the town was still in mining-camp days.”
Robin nodded. “The Whitman Company Chronicle. Your Sentinel was a rival and eventually the last one standing. They took issue with the controlled voice during some labor disputes. For a while there were two newspapers. The Whitman Company Chronicle became the Whitman Chronicle to hide the obvious ties, as if they could be hidden, but within a few years the Sentinel had rendered it irrelevant.”
“That’s what I recalled. You do have the Chronicle on microfilm?”
“A lot of them. Some have been lost to history, I think, but we’ve got most of them.” She frowned at the photographs he had in the open folder. “Who are you looking for?”
“Just names.”
“Why are so many labeled NO?”
That one hung him up for a second, because he didn’t understand the truth well enough to lie about it.
“I guess I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who they were,” he said finally.
“Okay. So you just want to match pictures? That’s going to take a while. Maybe a very long while.”
“I’ve got four names, too. Just no dates.”
“Do you know who they were? What they were involved with?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“How did you get the names, then?”
Roy thought for a second and then smiled sadly. “It was a hot tip.”
She gave him a curious look but didn’t push it. “Well, give me the names and I’ll see what I can find. We’ve got pretty good indexing of the company records, so if they had anything to do with the Whitmans, I should be able to generate something.”
The family archives were housed in a private, locked room at the rear of the library. You couldn’t spend time there without supervision, and you couldn’t check anything out. There was a reason: this collection held the most precious recorded elements of the town’s history. Robin unlocked the door and led Roy into the room, which featured glass cabinets displaying certain historical relics, one long and ornate reading table, and, everywhere you looked, the austere faces of Whitman family members watching from portraits and photographs along the walls. It was not unlike being in Wyatt’s lighthouse.
“I’ll get you the microfilm and let you start where you like,” Robin said. “Then I can run a search on those names you have. It’s a shame you don’t have a clearer starting point in time. Are there no indications in the photographs?”
“Well, it’s a work crew of some sort,” Roy said. “Not miners, either. Looks like they’re timber men, probably. Or builders.”
He set the folder down on the table and rifled through the photographs, pulling out a few as indications. “See, there’s a group of men holding a timber saw, and here we’ve got—”
“Oh,” Robin said, “they’re building the trestle.”
Roy turned away from the pictures and looked at her. She smiled in perfect confidence.
“The one that’s still standing. The wooden one, out west of town?”
“At Blade Ridge.”
“That’s right.”
He looked back down at a photograph of men holding a large log over their shoulders and said, “How in the hell can you be so sure?”
She laughed. “I’m not clairvoyant. I’ve already been through this routine once. Someone else was researching the trestle itself, and we went through a lot of those old company papers.”
“Wyatt French?”
She nodded, indifferent, neither surprised that he knew about this nor sharing the troubled sensations that Roy was feeling.
“That’s right. He owned most of the property at one time. He was very interested in the history.”
He certainly seemed to be, Roy thought, and then he said, “Well, that can cut some time down. Maybe I should start with the trestle. I think that makes a lot of sense.”
“It’s a sad story,” she said, moving toward a row of locked cabinets at the back of the room.
“I know that the mines didn’t pan out for the company.”
“I mean the trestle itself,” she said over her shoulder, unlocking a drawer and running her index finger over canisters of microfilm. “A lot of people died while it was being built.”
“Died how?”
“Sickness, first. Murder, later.” She withdrew two canisters and said, “This should do it. Should give you a start.”